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  3. (1)We’ve spent more man 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, me character artful

(1)We’ve spent more man 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, me character artful

游客2023-12-03  9
问题     (1)We’ve spent more man 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, me character artfully sketched by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman. Willy is, perhaps, America’s consummate loser. But if you can bear with me for one moment, imagine he lived in current times, not amid me postwar prosperity of 1949. Sure, his career was ebbing, but Willy kept a job for 38 years, he owned his house—he had just made me last mortgage payment—and had a wife and two children. Today he’d be a survivor.
    (2)Has our view of failure softened since Willy Loman’s day? In a country with a high level of unemployment, and where promotions, bonuses, and retirement savings seem like relics, failure is something many of us are wrestling with right now. But if we begin to accept that success is not a simple, upward career route, mis economic crisis may not just reduce the stigma of being sacked but transform me way we think of failing. Shocking as it sounds, failure can be a good thing.
    (3)It’s true, recessions can wreck self-esteem. In a nation built on success and a gloriously entrepreneurial spirit, the prospect of failure can make people fearful—and shameful—even when it is not their fault. "There is a crash in every generation," wrote Arthur Miller in 2005, just before he died, "sufficient to mark us with a kind of congenital fear of failure." Miller was commenting on a wonderful book by historian Scott Sandage called Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Sandage believes Willy Loman was a success. But me message of the play, he says, is that "if you are not continuing upwards, if you level off, you have to give up. You might as well not live."
    (4)In his book, Sandage argues mat America’s ideas about failure were formed between 1819 and 1893, as busts followed a series of speculative booms. Before then, failure was not associated with individual identity. It just happened to you. Bankruptcy was thought to come from overreach—living excessively—not from lack of ambition. By me end of me 19th century, says Sandage, failure had gone from being a professional misfortune to "a name for a deficient self, an identity in me red." Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed mis in his journal in 1842: "Nobody fails who ought not to fail. There is always a reason, in me man, for his good or bad fortune." By the middle of me last century, at the time Willy Loman was hawking his wares, Americans could not face "me possibility of defeat in one’s personal life or one’s work without being morally destroyed," according to sociologist David Riesman. This foolish, dangerous idea is under assault right now. Should financial success really be a moral imperative? Why do we think that an ordinary kind of life is of lesser worth? Studies have found that our most potent emotional experiences come from relationships, not careers. Those who work in palliative care(临终关怀)report that, on their deambeds, most people don’t regret not having clambered a rung higher, but having worked too hard, and having lost touch with friends.
    (5)And history shows it is only when me economy is in the mud that Americans feel free to do what they want to do. As me author J. K. Rowling said so concisely in her 2008 address to Harvard graduates, failure can mean a "stripping away of the inessential." When she was an impoverished single mother, she started to write her magical tales: "I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other man what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me." This doesn’t mean it is an uplifting experience to be unemployed, of course. But it may mean we ease up on some of the judgment that springs from the false idea mat a person without a job has not just hit bad luck or a poor economy—but is a failure.
    (6)It may also mean we can accept plateaus, understand that a life has troughs we can climb out of, and that a long view is the wisest one. A recession is a great reminder that all of us need to learn. [br] According to Sandage, in the beginning people attributed one’s bankruptcy to _____.
选项 A、his moral deficiency
B、his lack of ambition
C、his flawed personality
D、his excessive pursuit
答案 D
解析 根据第4段第4句可知，起先人们认为破产是来自于“过度地生活”，而不是由于缺乏抱负，D中的excessive pursuit对应原文的living excessively，同时可排除B。A“道德缺陷”、C“性格缺点”是后来兴起的对失败的不健康的归因，因此不选。
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